


How Can Light Be So Hard to See?

by DarkPoisonousLove



Series: Stars Can Only Shine on a Sky of Darkness, My Love [2]
Category: Winx Club
Genre: Accidental Sequel, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Can be read alone, Declarations Of Love, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Happy Ending, Love, Post 3x10, Post-Betrayal, that's the part we're fixing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:28:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25756633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkPoisonousLove/pseuds/DarkPoisonousLove
Summary: It’s been seventeen years and Griffin has finally seen the light she was looking for inside herself when she left Valtor. Can she find her way to him and leading their love out of the black void it’s trapped in before it has surrendered its last breath to the indifferent cold of the universe?Sequel to "How Can Darkness Burn So Brightly?" but can be read on its own.
Relationships: Griffin/Valtor | Baltor (Winx Club)
Series: Stars Can Only Shine on a Sky of Darkness, My Love [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1868452
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	How Can Light Be So Hard to See?

**Author's Note:**

> _Love can flow,  
>  like a river of light  
> to touch the darkness  
> of a soul  
> and not burn into it a day  
> when the cover of night  
> was always a temple for magic,  
> always a temple for love_

“What are you doing?” Valtor’s voice snapped her concentration in half and let the spell fall through the cracks just like its effect slipped through her fingers. The energy was still there, though, flowing around, confused without the direction of the words, longing. It was the perfect reflection of him as he stood in her cell like his magic had whisked him away from his previous location without his permission, yet he only had eyes for her instead of looking at its betrayal.

“If you’re here, you know what I’m doing,” she let her fingers relax at her sides and stop curling with the need to grab at him. She didn’t even need to raise her hands to brush them against the tangibility of the feelings floating all around them as they were shed from the blue of his eyes like the tears she hadn’t gotten to see after she’d left him. Her magic had fulfilled its purpose and led him to her finally powered by the right emotion.

He had felt it. He had felt all the threads made palpable by his heart in the bed of the spell. They bound them together like strings of fate but were far more powerful as it had been fate exactly that’d been trying to sever them. Every step of the way the universe had thrown blades of pain and shards of broken memories at them to cut them from the cocoon they’d spun together for themselves. It had carved her out amidst her metamorphosis to leave her half wings, half centipede and force on him the outside cold but their silk was still around them waiting to be pieced together in a protective veil fire couldn't burn and light couldn't come through.

Valtor shook his head. “You can’t do this. You shouldn’t be able to.” His eyes traced over her like he couldn't find the light spilling from her anymore despite the nature of the spell and the light magic giving it its power. “You’re a witch through and through.”

A witch she was. But not the darkness the Ancestrals had taught him to associate with the word.

“I am your witch,” Griffin let the devotion glide over the feelings the spell had brought out and fall directly in his heart to bring him to the bridge standing between the two of them and let him cross it at his will. If he could find it in himself to trust what waited on the other side was better than the quicksand behind his back.

Valtor’s gaze stopped its frantic racing now that there was solid ground under his feet and he reached for the monad symbol still hanging from her neck where it’d belonged ever since he’d given it to her. He brushed his fingers against it tentatively as if not quite able to believe the sight of it, as if he’d only now noticed the golden gleam coming from the gift nestled so close to her heart. “My necklace,” he murmured in foggy recognition before trailing his touch over to where her heartbeat was excited after all those years it had had to stay steady in his absence just to keep her from crumbling to pieces at the slightest lively movement.

“Your heart,” Griffin covered his hand with hers pressing it more firmly against the beating organ to feel all that lived in it. “Your love.”

Valtor’s eyes finally found hers and she held his gaze as she reached slowly to put her free hand over his heart. She’d disintegrate at the smallest tremble from either one of them. The only thing she could stand pumped through her veins was his closeness after all the years of blood rushing through her with no way of spilling out no matter how many wounds she could feel scarring her pale skin and the flimsy muscles beneath.

“How did you get it back?” Valtor’s voice was still quiet as if to remind her she had to be strong for him, for both of them, after she’d broken down their union, their wholeness.

“I didn’t,” Griffin didn’t let go of him even as the fire flared inside him to have his magic prickling on the surface of his skin like small white-hot thorns growing between them to poke holes in their flesh. Holding on was the only way to erase the illusion of the cold that Omega had pushed into his mind to appear like an ice block between them. Her heart had never been touched by frost trying to scrape his fingerprints off of it. “It never left.” Her whole soul had ran temperature akin to a fever just to keep the memories of him snug and comfortable inside her in hopes he would come back to them one day. Come back to her.

Valtor wasn’t moving, not even his chest budging to let the oxygen his flames needed through. Just his lips parting to leave space between them. “But you did.”

“I was never trying to leave you.” Griffin held her breath waiting to see if he’d take her truth from the hands that had caressed him one moment only to throw magic against him the next. It was all she had to offer and rejection would be like having her fingers cut off as no touch would ever reach her brain outside the soothing blue vastness of his eyes holding her like space held the stars. “I just wanted to leave the Coven, leave behind who it made me,” she forced out more of the darkness that had separated them when the shine of her eyes hadn’t been enough for her to see through it. Not with his flames under the command of someone else and not his own wishes.

“It made you my partner,” Valtor tugged on the necklace for her to feel it digging into her throat like it was his refusal to listen to anything else she had to say but his other hand was still covering her heart as if to protect it from harm. And he hadn’t put his mark on her to silence her free will either. He still had leftover faith in her choices, or at least some surviving respect for them that let her live as well. And their love was still alive in both their hearts as proven by the magic he hadn’t taken away from her.

Griffin shook her head. “I was there to make magic with you,” her powers didn’t need more than the mention to run through her veins ready to heal the emptiness she’d left next to him if he’d let them, “and to have your back.” Keeping him safe had always been her mission and she’d failed spectacularly when she’d gotten lost in the deception her own mind had pulled on her after all her time with the Coven and their way of operating. “I was there to love you,” her heart thumped louder to hold her in the right place. “Mass murder and colossal destruction was what the Coven was forcing on me. And that was not who I was.” There was still enough anger in her coming out not just through her magic but through that of her students’ as well as she passed it down to them but the fact that they were the way to bring her down was proof enough of her words. And she’d been the way to bring him down to prove he wasn’t the Coven’s either.

“That was who you were with me. That was who we both were.” Valtor threaded his fingers through hers as if to pull her back into the memories she was trying to rip herself out of to leave him with a bleeding brain once again. But it wasn’t her who’d played mind games with him. He’d been raised in the darkness of those with nothing his fire could do against them until it had started obeying them and turning dark itself. It had lacked the light he needed to break through the illusions and see all the lives he’d spared when she’d been by his side to give him a better plan he could use, to give him a better view of himself.

“Remember what you told me? That comparing my eyes to suns wouldn't do them justice?” Griffin almost heaved a sigh of relief at the spark of recognition lighting up his gaze. Their history wasn’t so easy to swallow and suffocate in darkness since their romance had bloomed in the late hours in his room in quiet words whispered in the night for it to be their witness and nourish them away from prying eyes. “Staying with the Coven would have extinguished them and that was not what you wanted. You wanted suns. Why are you trying to destroy them?” she clutched at his hand to hold him in the pools of gold, the substance her gaze was made of too rich for trickles of guilt to break through with their thinness. “If you didn’t want their light, why were you comfortable sleeping with it and embracing it?”

Valtor held on. He released the gold of her monad he’d held prisoner now that he had that of her eyes to be his armor of protection and rested his hand on top of hers to press her palm harder into his heart. His magic was swift like a flash of lightning as it removed both their gloves only to leave her flooded by his warmth instead of frying her nerves like her escape in the middle of the night had done to her.

“You wanted the witch that I am, that I have always been.” He’d leaned in her healing touch countless times just like he was doing now. “You wanted the light in me as much as I wanted your flames. I would have never let it blind you any more than you would have let your fire burn me. I would’ve never let it obliterate our darkness.” There had been shadows dancing in the corners his flames hadn’t quite reached into and there’d been pain spilling from her fingertips that she’d touched everyone else with to save him from it, and their demons had been twirling together in a love ritual among the murky waves rippling off of their beings. “But I couldn't have let it get snuffed out either.” She’d heard too many people equate witches to monsters to have allowed herself to reinforce the mistake.

“I would've never sacrificed my flames for you either,” Valtor said, the understanding licking at her from his icy gaze like fiery tongues along her flesh keeping all the cold of their past away. All of it. Even the icicle she’d pushed in his chest and had to melt with her own fingers.

“I should have never expected you to.” She’d stroked his humanity and she’d loved the menace he had been. She’d held the spark he was in her hands and had stood amidst the wildfire he’d made for without a threat for her life, nor for her conscience. They’d simply been two forces of nature taking their toll in a hostile universe that hadn’t wanted them. At least they could have been without anyone trying to force them into the moldings of weapons pointed at a target that wasn’t their own. She should have pointed them in the right direction instead of pulling them apart just to leave them more lost.

Valtor leaned in now that she was right there in front of him and the only thing in his reach and his lips were pressing against hers the same way their hearts were being pressed in each other’s palms. It was much better than the memories she’d kept cold in her head to preserve them. Better than she’d ever dared paint in her mind a reunion between them would feel when her heart had been running from the emptiness that imagining her soul piecing together bathed in his heat would leave once she had to face reality. But there was no fantasy here, no fairytale she could only read but never experience.

Their mouths were one and their tongues were together again, dancing to celebrate the return home. His teeth were in her lips, sinking in the vulnerable flesh to leave his presence all over it and make sure every moan that left her would dip into his closeness on its way out to flaunt it into the face of the universe the moment her voice made it real and tangible. He was breathing into her lungs again – love and fire, and darkness. His very essence. And hers.

Pulling away was yet another cruelty of reality and she was licking her lips to gather every last remnant of his taste on them and draw it inside her. After all these years of kisses feeling like she was cheating herself out of love, her stomach was about to rumble its protests against the denial she had to face as they parted and her heart was only in its place to stay under his palm. She was in the only place she’d ever belonged and his hot pants were scorching the memories of her wrongness off of her skin to leave her all his again. Like she should have always been.

Griffin barely managed a whisper through all the life he’d released inside her, “The universe be damned.”

“What was that?” Valtor’s eyes were on her and the blue was crystal clear as it waited for her answer to nestle into itself where his trust would keep it. And there was the fresh knowledge not to encourage his destructiveness with a lie.

“I have my everything back,” Griffin pressed her forehead against his both to revel in the closeness he was allowing her once again and to seal the confession in their minds and their flesh. There was nothing that could erase his heat from her skin and the seventeen years of loneliness she’d doomed them both to had proven that. His flames were at home inside her and she was at home inside them. It was enough for her.

Valtor cupped her cheek in lieu of holding her gaze, his eyes closed in content as if there was no danger out there requiring his alertness. “Where do we go from this cell?”

“I remember you mentioning something about a castle among the stars,” Griffin dug the words out from under all the thoughts her mind was throwing at her to bury her alive. But it couldn't when there were no corpses she was leaving behind, just her life. “I would really like to find that one. We can make our own universe there.” There was no place for her in the one she was already in if she couldn't have him.

“Just the two of us?” Valtor looked at her, the ice of his gaze pressing into her gently to probe as if he was afraid too much of it could chill her to the bone and chase her away in search of sunlight even though she’d always liked the stars shining in the dark and the sparks of his fire flying around her mind like fireflies in a garden.

“If that will be enough for you,” Griffin gave her answer since there was nothing to ask him. And there was nothing to ask herself.

She was leaving behind everyone else she cared about but she owed it to herself. She’d ran away from her happiness once and all the love she’d gotten despite that had convinced her to forgive the universe for the piece of her being it had taken away. Her friends and her students had been more than enough to convince her she was wanted and needed, that she was worthy of existing. They had given her everything she could have asked for in those seventeen years. But she’d never found someone to give all of herself to, not even Faragonda who had always accepted every last grain of darkness inside her and had held the broken pieces of her heart unafraid of cutting herself. Not when Faragonda couldn’t make the same use of her light Valtor could.

“It will be everything,” Valtor gave her the whole universe.

**Author's Note:**

> I had an idea and then managed to tie it in with "How Can Darkness Burn So Brightly?" so we got this sequel. Hope you liked it!


End file.
